Invited Ascent vs. Forced Passage

Best current answer: these are not one practice in different costumes. They share the furniture — gates, guardians, levels, garments — but split on the four questions that matter: who starts, what is met, what the danger is, and what counts as arriving. On how you get through, the sources fall into distinct types. In the Hermetic Poimandres you pass by giving something up: the soul hands back one vice at each of seven zones and is then "made one with God." In the Pistis Sophia you pass by knowing the right words and marks — you speak each ruler's "defence" and show your seal, and a soul without them is handed to punishment. In Plotinus there are no gates at all; the only obstacle is the soul's own attachment, and arrival is a moment of union — the seer becoming "one with it, like a centre that coincides with another centre" — that the soul cannot yet hold. The strongest support is that arrival itself means different things across the sources. Union in the Hermetic text and in Plotinus looks similar, but the Zohar's three rabbis "arrive" by dying and not returning — a blessed end, not a technique to repeat — and Patanjali's out-of-body power is a trap that blocks the real goal, not an arrival at all. The oldest layer, the Egyptian and Babylonian gate texts, shows the raw imagery is ancient but describes gods, not human techniques: Ra is admitted when a guardian is told to open, while Ishtar threatens to smash the door. The sharpest tension sits inside single sources. Patanjali's key line divides translators — one reads it as entering another person's body (real travel), the other as entering one's own finer body (inner change) — so the text may not settle whether this is a journey. A named gap remains: the Jewish palace-ascent texts are not yet held here. The biggest question right now is whether "arrival" ever means the same thing across these sources, or whether union, safe return, blessed death, and a forbidden power are simply four different destinations sharing one set of images.